“In the early hours of June 22 in 1941, Lobach knocked on the door of my bedroom.
My room was next to his wife’s bedroom, and he signalled me to be quiet, get
dressed, and come with him. We went downstairs and sat in the smoking salon.
Lobach had been up all night. He had the radio on, and I realised that something
serious had happened. Operation Barbarossa had begun. Germany had invaded
the Soviet Union on Midsummer Eve.” Vanger gestured in resignation. “Lobach
took out two glasses and poured a generous aquavit for each of us. He was
obviously shaken. When I asked him what it all meant, he replied with foresight
that it meant the end for Germany and Nazism. I only half believed him—Hitler
seemed undefeatable, after all—but Lobach and I drank a toast to the fall of
Germany. Then he turned his attention to practical matters.”
Blomkvist nodded to signal that he was still following the story.
“First, he had no possibility of contacting my father for instructions, but on his own
initiative he had decided to cut short my visit to Germany and send me home.
Second, he asked me to do something for him.”
Vanger pointed to a yellowed portrait of a dark-haired woman, in three-quarter
view.
“Lobach had been married for forty years, but in 1919 he met a wildly beautiful
woman half his age, and he fell hopelessly in love with her. She was a poor, simple
seamstress. Lobach courted her, and like so many other wealthy men, he could
afford to install her in an apartment a convenient distance from his office. She
became his mistress. In 1921 she had a daughter, who was christened Edith.”
“Rich older man, poor young woman, and a love child—that can’t have caused
much of a scandal in the forties,” Blomkvist said.
“Absolutely right. If it hadn’t been for one thing. The woman was Jewish, and
consequently Lobach was the father of a Jew in the midst of Nazi Germany. He was
what they called a ‘traitor to his race.’”
“Ah...That does change the situation. What happened?”
“Edith’s mother had been picked up in 1939. She disappeared, and we can only
guess what her fate was. It was known, of course, that she had a daughter who was
not yet included on any transport list, and who was now being sought by the
department of the Gestapo whose job it was to track down fugitive Jews. In the
summer of 1941, the week that I arrived in Hamburg, Edith’s mother was somehow